12/30/15

Luis Bunuel and Salavdor Dali famously began their
influential Surrealist film Un Chien
Andalou with the slice of an eyeball, while the Russian Futurist filmmaker
Dziga Vertoz closed his operatic collage film Man With a Movie Camera by melding the human eye with the lens of a
movie camera. The opening frames of Jurassic
World confront the audience with an eyeball as well, but one that
represents a very different relationship to movies than those manifesto-fueled
avant-garde masterpieces of the late 1920's.
The opening optical confrontation presented by this box-office
record-breaking behemoth got me thinking about the ways in which all of these
films are very much invested in their sense of themselves as movies. Where Un Chien Andalou and Man With a Movie Camera are both exercises
in anti-narrative, privileging non-linearity and anti-realist camera trickery
over story, Jurassic World is a
post-narrative film, resigned to its repetitious story elements and
characterizations, and confined to having a conversation with itself, and us,
about its own nature as pure cinema product. In this way, Jurassic World is a perfect gauge for how the medium of film has
changed in the intervening 85+ years. It's also a perfect gauge for how the
movie industry has changed since the release of the original Jurassic Park.

Like the sullen, inoffensive baby dinosaurs depicted
in the film, sentenced to a life of having child after child ride them in
circles, Jurassic World is a tired
tourist attraction that is excessively aware of the tired gaze of its audience,
but even more aware of their gullibility as consumers. The opening scenes of the film are riddled
with dialogue that seem to be desperately reassuring the audience that this
entry will certainly have "more teeth," while simultaneously sounding
utterly hopeless about the fact the film will have any "bite" at all.
As Bryce Dallas Howard's corporate liaison Claire states early on to some
potential sponsors of the park: "No one's impressed by a dinosaur anymore."
What we have in this new entry is a film that looks right at the audience,
states that it's a failed product, and then laughs at us for having vaulted it
to untold box office success.

To be fair, like the character of young Gray (Ty
Simpkins), there are a lot of people out there who, simply put, are just into
dinosaurs. The history of cinema holds a long fascination with dinosaurs, from
the animated Gertie the Dinosaur
(1914), to The Lost World (1925), King Kong (1933), the pioneering
stop-action work of Ray Harryhausen, and on through the ever-evolving CGI work
of Industrial Light and Magic. Historically, the cinema has served as a magical
tourist destination to witness these extinct creatures. Jurassic World conflates this idea of cinema-as-tourism in numerous
ways throughout the film.

A few years before the release of the original Jurassic Park, John Urry published an
influential book in tourism studies called “The Tourist Gaze” which would
define our movie-going preoccupation with these giant reptiles as a
Collectivist Gaze--the same type of mass, pre-packaged tourist experience
depicted as the central location of the film. Tourists who flock to theme parks
are central to the Collectivist Gaze--you see them running in colorful,
multi-cultural, chaotic streams as the new, mutant products of this entry
easily pick them off. Tourists who stray from the Collectivist path, like
brothers Zach and Gray in their protective "eye-pod" deciding to go
off-roading, are travelling into the realm of what Urry would call the Romantic
Gazer, solitary and in search of the Authentic.

The Jurassic films of the past have allowed audiences
to travel these imagined borderlands of the gaze, but Jurassic World truly falls short when it comes to discovering
anything authentic. In fact, much of the film feels like it takes place in
"Meta-World," with the Gen-Y dinosaur monitor Lowery (Jake Johnson)
explaining how he got his Jurassic Park
T-shirt on e-bay, extolling the authenticity of the original; Claire's
exasperated comment about a potential "Verizon Wireless" sponsored
attraction; the vigorously infused product placement involving not only the
park's Margaritaville outlet, but a Jimmy Buffet-penned song on the soundtrack
to boot. Once again, our sense of ourselves as consumers is a primary concern
of Jurassic World, almost to an
extent that would make German theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht take
interest, were it not so narrowly focused on capitalist gain. Brecht was a
pioneer of meta-theatrical techniques who was invested in continually reminding
his audience of their role as spectators, and the constructed aspects of
spectacle. Brecht saw this awareness as essential to liberating audiences from
the dark goals of propagandists and myth-makers after WWI. In Jurassic World, utilizing the main
attraction of the theme park as an antidote to war is a theme that echoes this
sentiment throughout. Yet, the film’s villain, Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio),
comes to a wholly uninspired end at the jaws of the raptors he has been
taunting and planning to exploit throughout; ultimately, his most relevant
moment comes when he kicks back in front of the monitors during the final
action sequences, takes a long draw from a cine-plex-sized Jurassic World soda cup and inquires: "You recordin' this
thing?” An unsubtle reminder of the
endless reproduction of these types of franchises, to be sure, but also a
moment that feels like the makers of Jurassic
World are just rubbing our noses in the proceedings late into the film.

With all this in mind, I want to read Jurassic
World--that is, the park itself--as the current movie industry, desperate in
its attempt to cross-breed any number of market-proven ideas, particularly of
the recycled variety. The immersive audience experiences of the park, from the
rolling gyro-scopes to the drop-down audience experience, all echo recent
attempts by the industry to try and offer more immersive cinema experiences to
a public that is less and less interested in going to movies. One central
character to this reading is Masrani (Irrfan Kahn). Dressed in what you might
call “Industry Couture,” it is perhaps no mistake that this freewheeling,
helicopter-piloting stakeholder’s nationality is the largest movie-producing
country in the world. His wonder at the new "Great White Hope"
creation reminds us again of our spectatorship, and the state of the movie
business. When Masrani first sees the creature, is he seeing the attraction, or
the audience for the attraction? Claire speaks of "measuring the animal's
emotional experience," to which Masrani replies: "You can see it in
their eyes.” Recent marketing research tools that track exactly where the
spectator's eyes are looking at any moment came to mind, as I stared again into
the eyes of the mutant beast. In reverse shot, we see the look in Masrani's
eyes reflect his excitement at this new advancement, and the potential profit.

12/28/15

Near the middle of Brad Bird's second live-action
feature Tomorrowland, a melee in a
sci-fi memorabilia store involving our young heroine Casey Newton (Britt
Robertson) and two inexplicable geek-chic robots (Kathryn Hahn, Keegan-Michael
Key) sends more than a few artifacts from our movie-going childhood splintering
across the screen. The filmmakers revel in the opportunity for multiple visual
references in this sequence, as Newton places her trinket of time travel at the
center of the swirling art design for Disney's 1979 feature The Black Hole, and eventually, as the
conflict over the trinket ensues, a model of the iconic robot Gort from the
1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still
collapses in shambles. This cue to the audience that Tomorrowland is not exactly your grandma's thinly veiled
apocalyptic warning occurs around the point that most audiences will
likely experience their own narrative comprehension begin to spiral into a
black hole, so to speak.

Tomorrowland
is a troubled piece of storytelling that offers four or five different
narrative paths, each one a bit more tonally skewed from the last. The
design of the picture matches the film's hapless narrative pastiche,
juxtaposing sequences that rely heavily on historical recreation in one moment
(the 1964 World's Fair), and the cartoonish design of Bird's more successful
animated film The Incredibles in the
next (bulbous robots with Swiss Army knife appendages). All of this is wrapped
in (or around) a simple tale of light vs dark, optimism vs pessimism, good
wolves vs bad, yet fraught by an inability to tell it simply, or even clearly.
A dedication to the “Disney Ideal” is on display from the very beginning of
Bird and fellow screenwriter Damon Lindelof's script, along with tiresome
homages to their Spielberg-saturated childhoods. Tomorrowland gives the impression of mature filmmakers who have
culled together the references of those childhood influences, but childishly
failed to heed any of the lessons on display in even the most basic of their
predecessor's oeuvre. In other words, both Bird and Lindelof could have
benefited here from reviewing Spielberg's first feature Duel, where a man in a car is chased by a man in a truck until he
defeats both man and truck.

In the early 1980's I watched Duel numerous times on Sunday afternoons and never tired of it. To
be fair, I could see that same 12 year-old “me” taking much more easily to the
pleasures of Tomorrowland than the
future, curmudgeonly “me” who has probably fed the "wolf of pessimism" too often
for his own good, to borrow the central parable of the film. One reason for this is that Tomorrowland plays relentlessly--and rather expertly--to a child's
sense of action and wonder, but at the expense of any semblance of adult
patience. Yes, there's a child in me that really digs Tomorrowland, and, by film's end, an adult that can't help but
admire the grandiose sense of inspiration it intends. Unfortunately, this
message of inspiration is perhaps the falsest note of the entire film,
channeled through the character of Casey Newton who is continually and vaguely
championed as just "knowing how things work." Robertson's histrionic,
goofy physiognomy doesn't help matters, nor does the hokey depiction early in the
film of her character’s infant self, a regrettable scene that seemingly forces
the script to turn against itself.

Perhaps the truest moment in Tomorrowland comes during one of the film's three or four finales,
when our human protagonists drive robot/villain Nix (Hugh Laurie) to
"monologuing" (in yet another reference to The Incredibles), as he exclaims: "You've got simultaneous
epidemics of obesity and starvation. Explain that one! Bees and butterflies
start to disappear, the glaciers melt, the algae blooms. All around you the coal
mine canaries are dropping dead and you won't take the hint!" Putting the
occasional pessimism of "future me" aside, I truly wish this weren't
the most impactful moment of the film, because it’s certainly not the tangled
mess that surrounds it: a beyond-convoluted plot involving a new army of robots
covertly sneaking Tomorrowland emblems into the design files and guitar cases
of potential world-shakers, who will then be transported into an extremely
difficult-to-navigate immersive fantasy commercial (?) that might inspire them to alter the course
of Frank Walker's generic apocalyptic predictions.

Frank Walker (George Clooney) is our exiled hero, a
former citizen of Tomorrowland inexplicably forlorn over an adolescent robot
named Athena (Raffey Cassidy). Athena is programmed to recruit the next great
generation of innovators, and eventually brings Walker and young Newton
together before ultimately sacrificing herself for the future of the human
race. In this second (or third) finale involving Athena’s sacrifice, the film plays
with the possibility of raising intriguing questions about human obligation in
a post-human world. Unfortunately, these themes have been explored more fully
in recent films such as Spike Jones' Her
and Alex Garland's Ex Machina. Even
within Bird's Pixar cohort, the creators of Wall-E
managed to delve way more trenchantly into this thematic territory, asking
perhaps the most intriguing futurist question of any animated film: What is our
obligation to two robots that fall in love?

Of course, just because one film does something
better than another film is no justification of a film’s success or failure. Tomorrowland certainly fails well enough
on its own, and gloriously so, with an absurdly over-stuffed quality that I
admire. Did I mention the scene where young Newton lights a combine tractor on
fire and sends it rolling driverless toward Walker’s house? Walker’s
freeze-gun? The hologram dog? Like the centerpiece memorabilia store of the
film, Tomorrowland is packed
floor-to-ceiling with shiny, enticing toys and trinkets. Its quality as product
far outweighs its shallow sense of social change. For a film that calls toward
fixing the climate crisis and various other forms of environmental and social
upheaval, it seems hopelessly fixed in the stagnant mentality that Nix so
eloquently describes. It’s the same mentality that the memorabilia store
perpetuates, that naturalizes us toward a world of adults playing with
children’s toys and paying for children’s movies, fixed in the daydream of the
past while the apocalypse plays out on a loop.

12/14/15

Taking a brief look back at my "Best Films" list from the last couple of years, the best I can say is that the few films at the top--Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio, Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, Leos Carax's Holy Motors--are still reliable indicators of what is invigorating and hopeful to me about the current state of movies. Here are the films that struck an ecstatic chord with me in 2014:

"The power of the image, our fear of it, the thrill that pulls us toward it, is real. Short of closing one's eyes - in cinema, a difficult and unprecedented act - there is no defense against it."
--Amos Vogel, "Film as a Subversive Art"